The Yorkshire Vet: Bridge too far for one stranded heifer - Julian Norton
“Yes, it’s all done and dusted and should be working perfectly. You just need to make sure all the computers are restarted before tomorrow,” reported our unerringly cheerful IT consultant.
The company that looks after our IT is fantastic and very competent and never phased by a challenge. They had just installed a dedicated broadband supply to provide more reliable data to and from the practice (whatever that means – I am definitely not an expert).
Who would have thought a veterinary practice required such hi-tech stuff? It doesn’t seem long ago that I was recording clinical notes on postcard-sized record cards. These cards lived in towering filing cabinets dotted around the office and reception. Twenty-five years ago, the closest we came to technology was a fax machine, and its requirement for connectivity was simply a telephone line. Lab results and clinical records from other practices chugged out, line by line, then page by page. By modern standards, this is clearly antediluvian, but at the time it seemed astonishing. Now, though, we had our very own fibre optic cable! I hoped it was money well spent, but time would tell.
For all the installation had been relatively simple, the journey back to West Yorkshire for our contractor was anything but. More messages arrived the following day: “I expect you heard about the pig on the roundabout – it was causing quite a problem, and I didn’t get out of Thirsk until after seven o’clock,” he explained with consternation. Pigs in the road are obviously less common in West Yorkshire than around our parts. From my experience, you are more likely to be stuck in roadworks or at a series of traffic lights than be held up by an escaped pig.
Eventually our IT guy arrived back in Wakefield with some amusement and not too much annoyance. His animal-related experience got me thinking about escaped animals in difficult places that I’d encountered over the years. As a young vet, I always dreaded a night on call where there had been an accident with a lorry load of animals. It became something of a recurring nightmare, but luckily, I only encountered this awful experience once during my career. The lorry had overturned on a corner, and young pigs were squashed, and some were badly injured. Assessing each one in detail was a challenge, but I think the right decisions were made for each case.
On another evening, one of our recently graduated assistants called me for help. She’d had two calls in quick succession – a poorly dog, and a heifer stuck on a footbridge. I reckoned the sick canine would be a simpler challenge for a new vet, so I offered to deal with the heifer.
A digger-type vehicle was already trundling slowly across the field to effect a rescue when I arrived, and the police (who had cordoned off the area with ‘incident’ tape) were able to take a back seat. The poor heifer had tried to navigate a narrow footbridge but had slipped so that all four of its legs straddled the walkway and were dangling in space.
As the only animal expert on site, I took charge with directions for placing the straps under the stricken beast. With careful instructions, the vehicle lifted the heifer upwards, outwards and away from the danger. Moments later she was lowered to the nearby grass, much to the amazement of the rest of her herd. The assembled crowd of observers and dog walkers clapped as the unfortunate heifer walked away as if nothing had happened.
Next week, more Tales of the Riverbank…